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Boundless, the free alternative to textbooks | Opensource.com

Boundless, the company that builds on existing open educational resources to provide free alternatives to traditionally costly college textbooks, has released 18 open textbooks under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), the same license used by Wikipedia. Schools, students and the general public are free to share and remix these textbooks under this license. The 18 textbooks cover timeless college subjects, such as accounting, biology, chemistry, sociology, and economics. Boundless reports that students at more than half of US colleges have used its resources, and that they expect its number of users to grow.

This chapter on Organismal Interactions references a Wikipedia article and several articles in The Encyclopedia of Earth. If you follow these links, you will find that the original articles are OER governed by the same CC BY-SA license.

From Boundless’ FAQ:

Is it really free? How does Boundless make money?Absolutely. Boundless books are 100% free with no expiration dates like textbook rentals or buybacks at the bookstore. It starts with Open Educational Resources. In the future, Boundless will implement some awesome optional premium features on top of this free content to help students study faster and smarter.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Boundless is already rolling out some of those premium features, including flashcards, study guides, and quizzes. To access these features Boundless requires a free user account. The textbooks themselves are completely open, without registration required, and are accessible at boundless.com/textbooks/.

Not to dash hopes, but the quoted response reads like this to me:
- Is it really free, and how do you make money?
- Yes, it is, and we do not. We hope to at some point by doing something you will pay us for.

I've never been a fan of freemium models, but I'm hopeful they'll work something else out, such as contract writing, adding on chapters as custom work for individual institutions' needs. Also, they might do well to partner with an on-demand printing service and make a little profit from those schools who need print materials.

Jane Park | As a Project Manager for Creative Commons, Jane manages the School of Open, a collaboration with the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU). A volunteer community-driven project, the School of Open offers free, online courses on the meaning and impact of “openness” in the digital age and its benefit to creative endeavors, education, research, and beyond. Participants learn how to use free technology and tools, such as Creative Commons licenses, to achieve their goals.

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